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Monday, September 26, 2011

Working from home

(En español más abajo)

I will work from home this week, my first week since I joined my new team eight weeks ago. I have been travelling a lot, and I am very tired. I enjoy being at our customer sites, but I missed my home and I know Gaby and the kids missed me too.

This 'home office' concept is fairly common for people in North America, but I figured some of the prospect immigrants and newcomers who read this blog might want to know a little about it. What does working from home mean to you? Well, here are a few answers:

Your company will normally provide you with everything you will need to do your job, including of course a computer and -most of the times- a printer.

They will normally take care of your internet bill. It's very important that you select a provider that can give you a fast reliable connection. The idea is that you won't see a difference in performance from where you were in the office.

In some cases, a dedicated phone line is also required. I have a VoIP phone, so in less than two minutes I added a second line for a few bucks and now I enjoy free calls to anywhere in North America and most of Europe on both phones. Really cool thing to have.

Some companies will even pay a portion or the entirety of your hydro bill. It's not my case, but I only have one computer and they don't consume much.

I am entitled to go and buy whatever I need to get me started (i.e. power bars or a network switch), but I must make sure that I dedicate a space to my home office and that I keep it in perfect working conditions. My company could come over my place and inspect me at any given time.

I can also buy everything I need to keep this going (paper, pens, etc). They opened me an account at Staples. It’s so tempting!!! :-)

Companies save a lot of money by having employees working from home (physical space, power, bandwidth, parking, supplies) and the employee saves a lot of money and time himself (commuting, gas, meals, etc). It's a win-win scenario most of the times.

As I said, today is my first 'official' day working from home. Given my new position, it doesn't really make a difference, as I will spend most of my time connecting to hospitals remotely (I could do it from anywhere: office, home, hotel room...). I'm happy I can do it from here because I get to spend time with Gaby during the day, and with the kids when they come back from school.

There is one potential problem I see with this home office scenario and that would be time management. I'm sorry for the mental picture, but one can be very easily sucked in and spent 10, 12 hours a day working when you're sitting in front of your computer in your underwear... Others might spend too much time away from the computer, fixing little things around the house.

Making sure that I achieve a good balance of work versus idle time at home is very important. The period between 9:00 AM and 3:00 PM is not a problem, because it's either me and Gaby or just me at home. But then I need two more hours worth of work, and I also need to avoid distractions like having the TV on and stuff like that.

Will I be successful in this new phase of my working life? Time will tell.